Internships: Your Organizations Competitive Advantage.
Every semester hundreds of thousands of organizations around the country make the decision to host interns. This decision is not one to be taken lightly. The truth is not every organization is a good fit to be an effective host for an internship program. The good news is that every organization can create a positive environment for an intern. However, there are several factors that you and your organization need to consider before making this important commitment.
As you start to assess whether your organization should host interns, the questions below may help you. Below you will find a list of questions that you and your organization should be able to answer before bringing on an intern for the summer. These questions need to be discussed with as many folks in your organization that you can, especially executive level leadership and the specific departments that may want to host an intern.
The following organizational audit can be a very useful tool in focusing your conversations with key leaders in your organization:
- How serious is my organization about hosting an internship program?
- What can a structured internship program work to our advantage? What are our goals?
- What human resources do we have to support an intern?
- Does my organization have the time to support an intern?
- What financial resources do we have?
As you read over the questions above and you start to formulate answers, you will begin to gain consensus with key stakeholders on the structure that your organizations internship will take. It is also important for you and your key stakeholders to understand why other organizations host interns and why millions of college students each year take part in these critical experiential education activities.
Remember, the experience that an intern has with your organization is totally up to you - the host organization. If you are going to host interns... make it AWESOME!
Want to take the next step in developing an amazing internship program at your organization? Please join us on November 17th at UCLA for the Los Angeles Area Total Internship Management Workshop!
To learn more and register, visit http://www.internbridge.com/ucla
At the workshop, you will learn how to:
- Effectively implement an impactful internship program
- Identify future hires with the only no-strings-attached 12-week interview
- Create and maintain a pipeline of highly qualified and educated full-time job candidates
- Increase your organization's brand awareness on college campuses